Ever Deepening

Time and Place

In the parable of dimensions, I have described a reality in which
intelligence can be supported in multiple dimensionalities. The lower
dimensional realities interlace ours. They presumably have a different
continuum of time, and a different metric of near and far. However, they
are not disassociated completely from our reality. We need their
components to become more dimensional, and they require our cooperation.
While this is anthropomorphic, a more precise formulation would relate
these as principles of energy and entropy (a mathematical statement of a
system's orderliness). I simply haven't succeeded in constructing that
formulation.

But I am bedeviled by conundrums that appear to be, at least in
principle, resolvable under the assumption that these entities "work"
(either in the psychological or physical sense) with us to move us along.
These experiences manifest on a scale that appears to violate the
principles of causality and locality that underlie our current
understanding of physics.

Science has struggled with a narrow aspect of this problem in the
theory of quantum mechanics. The theoretical concept of quantum
entanglement has elicited a great deal of speculation over the last fifty
years. Recent work in this area has led to an interest in quantum
computing, and truly "cosmic" speculation regarding "alternate" or
"parallel" universes. While intellectually stimulating, my interpretation
of these theories is that they indicate that the theorists have an
under-constrained solution space.

The most mundane of my conundrums is memory. As I was going through
high school and college, the techniques necessary to map and analyze brain
function were just being developed. The speculation regarding the
mechanism of memory had an enticing variety. Those studying primitive
neural systems believed that memories are encoded in timing cycles in the
neural connections. Others believed that the neural connections encoded a
form of predicate logic, with excitation and suppression functions encoded
by different types of synaptic connections. Those structures could
presumably encode information, just as a computer memory does. Still other
researchers considered the possibility that memories were encoded in
protein or nucleotide structures in the cell body itself.

Recent work on the structure of the neocortex has determined that it is
capable of formulating very sophisticated decision processes on our
sensory inputs. The publisher of that work, the Redwood Neuroscience
Institute, headed by Jeff Hawkins, postulates that the decision processes
are based upon predictions from memories stored in the neocortex. However,
I am not aware that they have identified the specific morphological
changes that encode memories.

What is intriguing about the structure of the neocortex is a redundancy
in the sensory processing layers. The neocortex has roughly six layers of
cells. Layers two and three, for some reason, are redundant. The same
types of cells lie in both layers, and they are densely
interconnected.

I do not believe that memories are coded in the brain. My prejudice is
that one layer is a sensory input layer, and the other is a temporal
resonance layer. When we take in sensory input, the resonance layer looks
into the past to find similar experiences, and draws upon past outcomes to
formulate a plan of action for the present.